India’s fastest growing designer is a one-woman powerhouse

Why Anita Dongre is ahead of the game

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Kate Middleton

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Dia Mirza, Prachi Desai, Anita Dongre and Sona Mohapatra

By seamlessly integrating creativity and commerce, Anita Dongre has become the Queen of Prêt in India. Her success lies in making luxury affordable for one and all, but it’s the marriage of fashion and ethics that makes her the torchbearer of our times.

On a hot summer day in April, Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, stepped out in a breezy printed dress with her husband Prince William to play cricket at Mumbai’s famous Oval Maidan with local children and cricketers Sachin Tendulkar and Dilip Vengsarkar. The paparazzi went ballistic as the duchess batted and bowled in a delightfully whimsical dress made by Anita Dongre, the only Indian designer she wore on her visit to the region. Within hours Dongre received panic calls from her IT staff—the website had crashed as hundreds of people from across the world logged on to buy it.

qww“Emails and phone calls poured in from as far as Brazil and Australia, with most buyers calling from the US and the UK,” said Dongre. Not bad for a designer who started out with two machines in the balcony of her home and a 300sqft store in Mumbai. Today, she has 475 stores across the country with a workforce of 2,500 employees, and hers was the first fashion house in the country to get private equity funding—from leading US firm General Atlantic. Dongre is clearly a woman with a passion for design.

The moniker ‘Queen of Prêt’ is apt for Dongre, who owns three successful highstreet labels—AND, Global Desi, and Grassroot—and the high-end Anita Dongre Bridal. By sheer size alone, she is India’s fastest growing designer. “Eighteen years ago I created my first brand, AND. I simply addressed the needs of countless Indian women who were going to work for the first time and wanted easy Western wear. That really paid off,” she told a packed audience earlier this year at Harvard Business School’s India conference.

In an industry known for its big egos but not necessarily big balance sheets, Dongre is somewhat of an anomaly. To dig deeper into what makes her journey so unique, I drove to Navi Mumbai, where straddling the hills of Rabale lies her kingdom, a factory and studio spanning 90,000sqft. Over a lunch of simple Indian food and crispy poppadum, she reminisced: “When I met Tommy Hilfiger for lunch last year, he said, ‘Why so many brands? Shut all down, just work with one.’ But I said, ‘How can I? They are my four children! Which one do I shut down?’” So what she did instead was hire the right CEOs to manage each brand, with her taking on the leadership role in design. Excerpts from the interview:

What sets you apart? What is your design philosophy?Design works within the basic premise that it has to make the wearer happy. Clothes are such an important part of our lives. When you wear the right clothes, it’s an immediate mood lifter, a confidence booster. Sometimes I am stopped in the airport by a total stranger who says, “I wore your outfit to my first interview and it’s so special to me” or “I wore Anita Dongre on my first date.” I realise then that I play a big role in people’s journeys.

You are a huge commercial success. But does the ‘commercial designer’ moniker compromise on creativity?If I wanted fashion to not be worn and go straight to a museum, I’d express myself through painting. I know creativity comes in many forms but for me design has to have intelligence and it must serve its core purpose—wearability. The minute I create a design, I put it on someone. I don’t see it on a dummy or mannequin. A human being has to wear it. And my first question to that person is always the same—“How do you feel?”—because for me that grabs the essence of design. So whenever girls interview for a job, I say, “A job requirement is that you have to be ready to change clothes 20 times a day!”

You took fashion, which is always seen as elitist, to ordinary girls not just in big cities but also small towns. Was that challenging? Why shouldn’t every woman have the right to look fantastic? Why do you have to spend a million bucks to do so?When I started working I wanted to wear clothes that had clean silhouettes. I didn’t want to look like a stereotypical OTT Indian. So I started making clothes for myself. I made linen shirt dresses (which are all the rage now) 20 years ago because that’s the way I used to dress. My friends wanted to wear them for the same reasons I did; and eventually I realised I had to cater to the needs of thousands of women who felt the same way. When I travelled to Rajasthan on AND-related work, I would order reams of block-printed fabric and make clothes for myself to cater to my bohemian spirit. Soon this metamorphosed into Global Desi. None of my brands have evolved from some marketing gimmick. When I started bridal wear five years ago, I catered to the grownup version of the Global Desi client who wanted her wedding dress to be light enough to dance in through the night. For me clothes always have to be for real people, for real needs.

On one hand you’ve got an international investor like General Atlantic to back your business; on the other you’ve got your sister, brother and son working for you. It’s an amazing mix. How has this mash-up of corporate and family worked for you?When General Atlantic came from the US to invest in a fashion brand, they were really surprised that there was nobody except Ritu Kumar and I who had their books in order. To ensure that we were transparent in our business dealings they must have sent at least 50 mystery shoppers to my stores. Ernst & Young combed through our business to see if anything was incongruous. And one of the reasons we run a clean business is that I have my family to help me run it professionally. They are the people I trust, the people who share the same value system and passion as me. I never take this for granted.

Fashion and empowerment—is this a phenomenon that exists in your business?This is what my sister, brother and I discuss all the time, what keeps us grounded. The responsibility of empowering so many people cannot be taken lightly. This is a journey and I’m taking so many people with me. Take the example of this particular tailor we work with. He asks for work on a regular basis. He has 25 people working for him in his workshop and he’s depending on me to feed that many mouths. I can’t just walk in and say I don’t have work for him. I have to create it. If I don’t create designs that will employ him and his team, they will not have food on their table. Sometimes I think I’m working for him! But this kind of responsibility gives me the discipline to work diligently everyday. And that’s the reason I simply love my brand Grassroot—it has the ethos of design intelligence that exists to employ and empower people.

Grassroot tugs at your heartstrings like no other brand. Why?Grassroot will never be a selfish organisation that works with people just when it needs them. People who work for this brand in villages creating amazing fabrics or embellishments are artisans. We can’t not use them. If a young designer from my team tells me, “I don’t want to use this craft this season,” I say she simply has to. We have to wrack our brains and see how we can use it because we need to keep the craftsmen alive. Grassroot is a philosophy of life for me. We adopted Charoti, a village in Maharashtra, one of the poorest in the country. Apart from agriculture, the villagers have no skills. We set up 35 sewing machines and a training centre, and invited volunteers to learn how to sew. Only women came forward. The men would rather sit around doing nothing. That’s the reason I believe women will drive this country. Thirty-five women came forward to say, “We want to learn.” I’m grateful I have the opportunity to speak to and impact women through design.